SEED Fellowship

The SEED fellowship focuses on scoping and developing a new UK-China creative industries research and innovation hub through scoping sectors, engaging stakeholders, empowering participants, and developing future-focused visions and strategies. This supports the AHRCs long-standing ambition to bring together China-UK creative industry stakeholders to develop research-industry partnerships for long term collaboration. Through a programme of scoping studies including research, workshops and creative activities the fellowship aims to understand the needs of, barriers to, and opportunities for creative industry practitioners and researchers to develop cross-cultural and collaborative projects between the UK and China. This will enable us to develop a strategic vision and an evidence-informed delivery plan for the UK-China creative industries research and innovation (R&I) hub to be launched in 2024.

We aim to strengthen existing partnerships and expand new R&I partnerships for the scaling up of sustained collaboration between the UK and China over the next 5-15 years. Our engagement activities will build a community of businesses, academics and industry members that are well trained and supported to enable them to build successful working relationships. The activities of the fellowship will build the foundations of a centre of excellence for creative debate, knowledge sharing, training, facilitating partnerships and accessing expertise that can be further strengthened through the future Hub's activities.

Unique to this fellowship is the Empower programme which will provide seed funding for UK-China projects that produce creative outputs, generate productive connections and test the effectiveness of the resources being produced by the fellowship team. Through the development of resources, including a toolkit, we will support cross-cultural collaboration which will be showcased through mixed-media content on social media platforms and our website. The model for this fellowship draws together expertise from across the breadth of the creative industries - in academia, business, policy and skills training from both the UK and China - in working groups, an Advisory Board and partnerships to ensure diverse needs and requirements are captured and embedded in the plan of the hub.

The fellowship will facilitate the launch and implementation of the hub in 2024. The research, sector knowledge and liaison with the research and innovation community are all focussed on developing a strong future UK-based Hub to support the work of the China-based Hub. The future Hub will be well equipped and fully resourced to act as a docking station for accessing knowledge and expertise; a centre of excellence for training creative entrepreneurs with cultural sensitivity; a club for intelligence gathering, creative debate and showcasing to the Hub's community and the general public, an accelerator for business research, innovation and growth, as well as business to business engagement; a facilitator of collaborative and interdisciplinary research partnerships; and a platform to create the conditions for sustained and productive partnerships between the creative industries in the UK and China.